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- Hacker News
- I've had a few of these musical splinters, and most of them have worked their way out with time. One was quite recent: the music video for Underwater Love by Smoke City, which was memorable for their bullet-time-ish effect that pre-dated The Matrix by a year or few.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesv3K4Dz9M (uploaded 12 years ago, but I couldn't find it for a long time and only looked again recently - whilst looking for Faith no More's song of the same name).
Another was the song Purple, for which the commonly shared MP3 was mislabelled as by the band Air. Turns out it was a band called Crustation, who released a single magnificent trip-hop album, with Irish vocalist Bronagh Slevin, and then disappeared into the ether. Took me a few sessions over a few years to track all that down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNJCVruRLc
Another one was a song that got high rotation for a very brief period of time (when I was on a driving holiday, and so had the radio on a lot) maybe on Triple J, early 2000s, called Media Junkies by the band of the same name. Turns out the song was actually called News Addiction. One hit wonder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyZxYopvowA
The last remaining splinter (that I can recall) is a song from the mid-90s, "eager beaver" or "tenfour" or some variation on that features heavily in the lyrics as truckers chatting over CB radios. Haven't done a search session in a number of years on that one, but never got anything close to a lead on previous attempts. Maybe it's time to have another go.
Way back then, it was the research that was at least part of the enjoyment. I think it taught me how to research, to some degree at least. I went from Faith No More to Mr Bungle, and back then it wasn't easy to find this kind of stuff. Mr Bungle then changed my entire future musical taste journey. Good times. Worth the effort.
by BLKNSLVR - It didn’t take me 15 years, but I had a similar experience with the Norwegian band Kaizers Orchestra. I first heard one of their songs used in a Flash animation (Bak et Hallelujah) in 2003 and I just loved it, but I had no idea who it was nor did I understand Norwegian.
I listened over and over trying to hear the lyrics and transcribe what I was hearing as best I could until I got something close enough to correct that I could search for it. The song was from their first album and came out in 2001 so finally I got lucky a few months later and found a Norwegian site that had the lyrics.
I’ve listened to every album of theirs since and they’re still one of my favorite bands. I even got to see them live when they toured the US last year. It wasn’t a huge audience but me and few of the other obvious diehard fans in the audience were glad they came over here.
by nkrisc - > I searched for the song on Pandora. We hadn’t checked it before because it’s no longer a major music service
I find that take interesting. I use Pandora to this day as my primary streaming source, as it has my vibes down perfectly, and no other services has that many years of training into what I like to listen to. But even more important, it is almost always the music source I see when I'm restaurants. I prefer small mom-and-pop type places, so maybe I'm only seeing a niche.
I'm not trying to argue it is a leading platform, as it clearly is not. But it is fascinating that people searching for music don't check what was a leading platform 10 years ago. Especially when the music in question is older than that. And the search started when it was a leading platform.
Actually that last point really confuses me - why would today's platform popularity have limited the search 15 years ago? That part of the story makes little sense. If this search began back when Pandora was at its peak, why wouldn't they have started from there long ago?
by codingdave - Funny timing... I'm a lost media junkie, here's my related story.
So there's this little mid 80's cow-punk band from NYC called Cowboy Mouth. They had a song called "Hurricane" that got some college radio play. They had one album, Cowboys and Indians, which I just love. Sold something like 10,000 copies, and vanished soon after that. There's basically 12 known songs by the band, a maddeningly small catalog.
Anyhow... Trying to find info on this band is beyond difficult.. Because there just happens to be another band called Cowboy Mouth out of New Orleans which have been active for 30 years and are much much bigger. Adding insult to injury, this other Cowboy Mouth had a hit song called "Hurricane Party"... So there is practically no way to search for the NYC band or the song Hurricane without bumping up against this other band.
Anyhow, in a stroke of luck I stumbled upon an old demo cassette tape by the NYC Cowboy Mouth. I was excited as the tape cover lists two songs that aren't on their album. I recently ripped the tape. The story gets stranger because none of the songs on the tape match the song names on the cover label. Ends up the tape has three previously unknown tracks (of high quality, sounds like they were recorded in the same sessions as the album). Its an amazing find, adding 3 songs to a 12 song catalog! But it's driving me crazy as I don't even know the names and have no way of finding out. And there are those other two unknown tracks listed on the label which I'm dying to find out about and hopefully hear one day.
Anyhow, I say the timing of this article is funny, because I just put the demo tape tracks up on YouTube a month ago, in hopes that someone might recognize them and shed some light on them. Or just to get the tracks into the hands of fans that are still out there.
Here's the tracks in case anyone remembers Cowboy Mouth and is interested in hearing them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7J9sU3qg4
by lordfrito - The streaming model really makes remembering details difficult.
I used to play only local files, and then during a time at university played in the office music on Youtube. One specific album got stuck in my head, but for a long while afterwards didn't find it again. No name, no lyrics - not a good starting point. I just remembered a pink unicorn and that is was psychedelic rock and that the singer sang with a specific deep voice. After several rounds of research (the same youtube channel is still up) and looking through uploads of the timeframe and their recommendations it turned out I misremembered: The cover had a rainbow cat looking into the distance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ea1mYXUcBY, Whoopie cat).
How I remembered was funny. I talked to someone about this, researched while, then talked again, when something came over me to look to the side into the distance with a slightly open mouth - just to suddenly realize that this face was on the cover, not the unicorn!
But actually, I still have that image of the unicorn cover in my mind (one color silhouette, hoofs into the air, but who knows at this point). The Whoopie cat album is definitely one I heard back than and it was the music I was searching for, but the unicorn cover probably also existed in that space and was a different album. Or did I just imagine something based on space stallions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Otaq2tmNMM)?
After that experience I set up a local music player again and downloaded some of the albums I wanted to remember.
by onli - For me it was a Bjork song but it was in Icelandic. I had heard it around 2010ish and didn't have the song. Because it was in Icelandic and I didn't know the name of the track I couldn't figure out how to find it - because I had streamed through all of Biorks albums on one of these streaming services and it wasn't on any of them. I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics, but I couldn't even identify a single word from memory that I could use to search for the lyrics.
After more than a decade The Guardian had an article on Bjork and mentioned something about her fan club on Reddit. So I thought I would ask there.
That hit the jackpot, someone mentioned she had an earlier band called Tappi Tíkarrass (from 1981-1983) and it was a song they performed on some TV show. https://youtu.be/nkuXOtFLMZw
by marai2 - If you like this kind of thing, you really need to listen to the podcast Reply All, episode 158 “The Case of the Missing Hit."
In a nutshell a guy in California recalled a song he loved in the 1990s, basically some lyrics and the melody, but was unable to locate any record of the song online or anywhere else. What he did in an attempt to identify the song and the musician behind it is truly next level.
It really was one of the best podcast episodes I’ve ever heard.
https://soundcloud.com/replyall/158-the-case-of-the-missing-...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/158-the-case-of-the-mi...
by ilamont - I love internet archeology! Some time ago I found out that Microsoft had released an official free expansion for Frontpage 98 with a bunch of themes. I managed to find on web.archive.org official Microsoft page with the expansion to download, but the download was done through some form and unfortunately none of the many website versions archived it correctly. Next I've checked if maybe it was archived on some PC magazine cover CD on archive.org, but no luck. Then I've started digging through Google but still nothing, except some old post on forum which had an attachment to download it, but it was not available anymore and once again, not archived... So I've started searching by the filename contained in the download link - nothing. Finally I've tried DiscMaster [1] to look for the filename and boom, there it was! I love the feeling when you are so many times on the edge of giving up thinking "it's gone forever", but try new things and finally find it, long forgotten but now safely (hopefully) preserved on my computer and backup drives.